Don Carlos Buell

• 1. Introduction

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  Don Carlos Buell arrived at the Battle of Shiloh on the second day of April 1862 convinced that he had saved the Union cause. By the following October, his own soldiers suspected him of treason. He was a general who could organize an army better than almost anyone in the war, yet consistently refused to use it. How does a man admired by Ulysses S. Grant end up resigning from the army in disgrace, too proud to accept the rank he had earned? Those are the questions at the heart of Buell's story. He was born in Lowell, Ohio, on the 23rd of March, 1818, the eldest of nine children, and would outlive most of his contemporaries, dying on the 19th of November, 1898. In between, he fought in three American wars, rose to command one of the great Union field armies, and then watched his career collapse entirely at a battle he barely even witnessed.

• 2. A Difficult Boy

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  Buell's father died when he was just eight years old, and from that point his uncle James P. Drake and aunt Priscilla Holmes Drake raised him. He was already a difficult child to know: distant, introverted, and regularly mocked by other children. The turning point came when he won a fight with a neighborhood bully. That experience taught him something he would carry his entire life: discipline and determination could overcome any obstacle. His uncle enrolled him in a Presbyterian school that stressed duty, self-discipline, patriotism, and belief in a Supreme Being. The values stuck, perhaps too deeply. His cousin George P. Buell, also destined to become a Union general, secured him an appointment to West Point. Despite genuine intelligence and strong skills in mathematics, Buell accumulated so many demerits that he graduated in 1841 ranked 32nd in a class of 52. His very first posting, with the 3rd U.S. Infantry in Florida during the Seminole Wars, produced no combat experience. Then, after the regiment transferred to Illinois, Buell got himself court-martialed for beating an enlisted man over the head with the blunt end of his sword. An Army tribunal cleared him, but the verdict attracted notable opposition. Even General Winfield Scott believed Buell deserved punishment, though the court declined to retry the case.

• 3. Tested in Mexico

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  The Mexican-American War gave Buell his first real test under fire. He served under both Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott, and by the end of the war he had been brevetted three times for bravery. He was wounded at Churubusco, a battle just outside Mexico City that saw some of the fiercest fighting of the campaign. Between the wars he worked in the U.S. Army Adjutant General's office and served as an adjutant in California, a role that sharpened his administrative instincts. He reached the rank of captain in 1851 and had risen to lieutenant colonel by the time the Civil War began. His years in staff and logistics work may have made him the finest organizer in the Western theater. They may also have calcified his habits of caution and his instinct that preparation must precede action, no matter the political cost of delay.

• 4. Army Builder, Slow March

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  In November 1861, Buell took command at Louisville, Kentucky, succeeding Brig. Gen. William T. Sherman at the head of what would become the Army of the Ohio. When he arrived, it was, by contemporary accounts, a barely disciplined rabble. He immediately set to work shaping raw recruits into soldiers. The Lincoln administration pressed him to advance into Eastern Tennessee, a region of strong Unionist sentiment, but Buell moved at his own pace. He argued that the railroad network was poor and that wagon-based supply lines would be vulnerable to Confederate cavalry. He proposed instead a coordinated push with Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck to seize Nashville. Halleck reluctantly agreed, and the capture of Fort Henry and Fort Donelson by Grant helped clear the path. The Army of the Ohio took Nashville on the 25th of February, 1862. On the 21st of March, Buell was promoted to major general of volunteers. But Halleck's simultaneous elevation to department commander now placed Buell subordinate to him, and the relationship between the two was already strained. Andrew Johnson, newly appointed military governor of Tennessee, had developed a lasting grudge against Buell for failing to liberate Eastern Tennessee, a grievance Johnson would nurse for years.

• 5. Shiloh and Its Shadow

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  Grant's Army of the Tennessee was camped at Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River when, on the morning of the 6th of April, Confederate forces launched a surprise assault that made Shiloh one of the bloodiest battles of the war. Buell's Army of the Ohio arrived the following day, and the combined forces drove the Confederates back. Buell, though junior in rank to Grant, refused to accept orders from him and insisted he was acting as an independent commander. He spent years afterward arguing that he, not Grant, had won the battle, writing that Grant had exerted no "marked influence that he exerted upon the fortune of the day." Historians Larry Daniels and Kenneth W. Noe later concluded that Grant had in fact stabilized the situation by the end of the first day, and that the rivalry between the two generals actively hampered the second day's operations. The combined force that followed Shiloh numbered 100,000 men. Under Halleck's personal command, they pursued P.G.T. Beauregard's Army of Mississippi toward Corinth, Mississippi. Despite a numerical advantage exceeding two to one, Halleck moved slowly. Buell moved even more slowly. During the march, he took extended pauses to repair railroad lines and refused to let his army live off the land. He court-martialed Col. John Turchin for allowing his soldiers to loot civilian homes, a decision deeply unpopular both with the troops and the War Department. President Lincoln overturned the verdict, and Turchin was eventually promoted to brigadier general.

• 6. The Perryville Reckoning

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  In September 1862, Confederate armies under Edmund Kirby Smith and Braxton Bragg invaded Kentucky. Buell wired Halleck with a plan to march on Louisville. Halleck, exhausted by months of delays, replied that he did not care where Buell marched as long as he was finally fighting. The Army of the Ohio entered Louisville on the 25th of September. Learning that Bragg's army was nearby at Munfordville, Buell declined to pursue him, convinced despite the evidence that he was outnumbered. On the 8th of October, Bragg struck a single corps of Buell's army at Perryville. Buell himself was stationed a couple of miles from the fighting and, due to a meteorological phenomenon that muffled the sound of artillery, did not realize a major battle was underway until late in the day. He committed only a fraction of his nearly 60,000 men against roughly 16,000 Confederates. His officers urged a counterattack the next morning. Buell refused, citing uncertainty about Confederate numbers. By dawn, Bragg had ordered a retreat. The Confederate invasion of Kentucky was repelled, but Bragg's army escaped intact. An Indiana artillery officer wrote afterward: "After Perryville, I became convinced that the sooner Buell was relieved of command of the Army of the Ohio, the better." Halleck sent Buell a wire relaying Lincoln's frustration in blunt terms: "The president does not understand why we cannot march as the enemy marches, live as he lives, and fight as he fights, unless we admit that there is some inherent defect in our generals and soldiers." On the 24th of October, Buell was relieved and replaced by Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans.

• 7. Loyalty Questioned

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  Among the uglier aspects of Buell's fall was the suspicion, which spread even to some of his own soldiers, that he was disloyal. He was one of a small number of Union generals who had owned slaves before the war. His wife had also owned enslaved people, though she freed them shortly after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter. Buell himself expressed no personal animosity toward slavery or Southern society, and his conduct in the field consistently avoided disrupting civilian life in the South, earning him the nickname "The McClellan of the West." A military committee investigated his conduct at and after Perryville but reached no conclusions. Buell considered his reputation vindicated. Grant, despite their personal rivalry, defended him in his memoirs: "General Buell was a brave, intelligent officer, with as much professional pride and ambition of a commendable sort as I ever knew." Grant went further, writing that when he became general-in-chief in 1864, he asked the Secretary of War to restore Buell to duty. Buell refused to serve under either Sherman or George Thomas, citing his belief that he outranked both of them. Grant called this "the worst excuse a soldier can make for declining service." On the 23rd of May, Buell's volunteer commission expired, returning him to the regular army rank of colonel. Unable to accept the demotion, he resigned on the 1st of June, 1864.

• 8. After the War

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  Buell's postwar years traced a slow downward arc. He settled first in Indiana, then in Kentucky, working as president of the Green River Iron Company in the coal and iron industry. He never wrote a memoir, but he produced newspaper articles defending his wartime record and targeting Grant, returning again and again to Shiloh and insisting to his dying day that he had been the battle's true victor. The death of his wife in 1881 hit him hard. His final years were marked by poverty and declining health. By 1898 he was an invalid. He died on the 19th of November, 1898, and was buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis. William T. Sherman, writing to his congressman brother John, had asked a pointed question years earlier: "You have driven off McClellan, and is Burnside any better? You have driven off Buell, and is Rosecrans any better?" The answer, for those paying attention, was complicated. Today, his personal papers, maps, correspondence, uniform, and West Point diploma are held at the University of Notre Dame, and Buell Armory on the University of Kentucky campus in Lexington still bears his name.